At least at the start of the series, Sandy is othered for being a land creature unable to breathe underwater. However, when you think about it, Sandy is vastly more closely related to 90% of Bikini Bottom’s citizens (fish) and to Pearl than to literally anyone else.
- Sandy Cheeks and Pearl Krabs are both mammals: class Mammalia, subphylum Vertebrata, phylum Chordata.
- Fish are… honestly a lot of things – highly nonspecific. So we’ll just genericize it and say they’re also all under subphylum Vertebrata.
- Patrick Star (sea star) is more closely related to the sea cucumber Kevin that he and SpongeBob idolize: both phylum Echinodermata. He’s the second-closest to the fish etc., as he’s also under superphylum Deuterostomia.
- Mr. Krabs and Larry the Lobster are expectedly related (suborder Pleocyemata, order Decapoda), but they’re also related to Plankton (copepod) under the superclass Multicrustacea. If you go far enough up the tree, these three are all more closely related to the nematodes than to the other cast (superphylum Ecdysozoa).
- Squidward (cephalopod) and Gary (gastropod) are similarly far out, being molluscs (along with bivalves, e.g. the ones used as a stand-in for birds). If you go far enough up the tree, they’re more closely related to annelids like the (fake) Alaskan Bull Worm than any of the other cast.
- SpongeBob is a sponge (phylum Porifera). He’s the furthest one out by far. Everyone else is in the animal subkingdom Eumetazoa, but not SpongeBob. The jellyfish (phylum Cnidaria) are closer to everyone else than SpongeBob is.
Here’s a really janky representation of how insanely far apart they are with a very high-level tree of life:
That must’ve been a pretty long shower.
Haha, for what it’s worth, I knew what this tree structure looked like in my head and just had to map it out in an image so this post wasn’t nonsense. The one thing I added that I didn’t think of in the shower was how much closer the crustacean characters are to the nematodes. (Edit: also Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy now.)
Steven Hillenberg would be proud of you.
He’s probably the reason I have any interest in marine biology.
quality post, thanks
Fish are… honestly a lot of things – highly nonspecific.
Ex-CUSE me!? What the hell? Fish are fucking fish. I can’t handle this kind of paradigm shift right now, don’t tell me we don’t even understand fish. Have I been lied to?
We’re basically fish, we just carry our own salty water around in skinsacks.
Also, all naturally occuring ice is basically rocks, and obviously molten rocks are lava, so we’re carrying lava in our bodies, which makes us lava monsters.
Also also, your (and mine) digestive system is just a tube of outside inside our bodies, so we are torus-shaped fish lava monsters.
You’re welcome.
A salmon is more related to, say, a camel than it is to a hagfish.
I don’t like that one bit.
- A bee is more closely related to a hermit crab than it is to a spider (both arthropod subphylum Crustacea).
- A spider is more closely related to a horseshoe crab than it is to a bee (both arthropod subphylum Chelicerata).
- A deer is more closely related to a killer whale (order Artiodactyla) than it is to a human (order Primates).
So fish are like trees, they look somewhat similar but are completely different?
Id personally compare them to fungi, the fish body plan predates trees which is partly why this happens. Turns out that when a body plan predates land life by a significant degree it ends up being quite weird, no I’m not counting the weirdos who happened to go on land before the moss started to get a foothold if you count them then I am sea life.
Yup! You’ll be happy to know, though, that amphibians (class Amphibia), mammals (class Mammalia), birds (class Avia), and reptiles (class Reptilia) all have their own pigeonholes.
What you won’t be happy to know is that a lot of things that are called “shrimp” aren’t actually shrimp. Shrimp are specifically the decapod infraorder Caridea. Anything else – presented in order of decreasing relatedness – like prawns (decapod suborder Dendrobranchiata), amphipods (order Amphipoda), or mantis shrimp (order Stomatopoda) are not shrimp.
You may (or may not) be surprised to learn this, but the accuracy of shrimp taxonomy actually has very little bearing on my personal happiness…
Gasp!!
What about Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy? Aren’t they just humans? 🤔
What do you mean? I remembered there were humans in this show. See, just look at the image! I totally didn’t think of the narrator and the pirate portrait and then give up.
I would imagine that would put them in the same grouping as Pearl and Sandy, given they’re all mammals.
You’re categorizing them according to phylogeny. However, the “othering” may have more to do with the species’ normal habitats. Pinnipeds and cetaceans belong to the sea. Perhaps they’d accept freshwater aquatic rodents like capybaras more than tree- and ground-dwelling rodents.
Oh, 100% true. Sandy needing a suit to breathe would be seen as very “alien”. I just thought it was funny phylogenetically. Maybe a funnier question given this setup is why Gary is a pet (see: “why is Pluto a pet but Goofy isn’t?”)
Another installment of someone mistaking this sub for /c/casualconversation.
I did think of it and visualize this image in the shower, for what it’s worth. The gorgeous illustration™ and written explanation are there because 99% of people are sane and therefore have no idea what the fuck any of this means.
